1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method for determining rubies. More particularly, the present invention relates to a ruby handling functionality for determining, entering and editing ruby text.
2. Description of the Related Art
“Ruby text” is the commonly used name for a run of text that appears in the immediate vicinity of another run of text, referred to as the “base text”. Ruby text serves as a pronunciation guide or a short annotation associated with the base text. Ruby text is used frequently in Japan in most kinds of publications, such as books and magazines, and also in China and Korea.
A ruby handling functionality is needed for computer programs which deal with Chinese, Japanese or Korean characters. For example, contrary to Western or Roman characters, Chinese characters often represent a word by a single character. Such Chinese characters (or Kanji) may be difficult to read because there are so many of them and one may not expect everybody to know all of them. Consequently, there is a need for expressing the way of reading a Chinese character by its phonetic transcription to enable people who do not recognize the character to nevertheless read it.
FIG. 1 gives an example of a simple Japanese sentence in which Chinese characters 100 are superposed by their phonetic transcriptions. Those phonetic transcriptions are written using relatively simple characters 102, which only represent the phonetic content of Chinese characters 100 rather than the semantic meaning. Characters 102, which are used for the phonetic transcription, are called “rubies” or “ruby text”, or in Japanese they are called “furigana” or “furigana transcription”.
In the example of FIG. 1, the sentence would read in Roman characters 104 “kore wa nihongo no rei”, which means “this is an example in Japanese”. Above the nouns “nihongo” and “rei” are their corresponding “rubies” in furigana, sometimes called furigana transcription. Even people who do not recognize the Chinese characters 100, sometimes called base text, therefore can read the sentence because they can be assumed to recognize the relatively simple furigana transcription 102 displayed above them. The transcription in Roman characters 104 shown in the bottom line of FIG. 1 is shown here for illustrative purposes only and typically is not displayed.
The easy reading of ruby text is possible because for the ruby text only a limited set of relatively simple characters (about several dozens) are used while there exist thousands of very complicated Chinese characters (kanjis) which cannot be assumed to be known by everybody.
Additional information about rubies can be found in “Ruby Annotation”, W3C working draft, 17 Dec. 1999 Sawicki et al., available at http://www.w3-org/TR/1999,/WD-ruby-19991217, which is herein incorporated by reference its entirety, and which contains a draft specification of markup for ruby and which also discusses some basics about ruby.
FIG. 2 illustrates an example of a ruby handling window 200 in accordance with the prior art. At first, a user selects a base text for which the user desires to generate ruby text, which then should be displayed superposed to (or above) the base text. In the example of FIG. 2, it is assumed that the base text for which a ruby generation should be performed is the same as base text 100 in FIG. 1.
After having selected this text as the base text from a document, a user may then start the ruby functionality and subsequently ruby handling window 200 as shown in FIG. 2 pops up. In ruby handling window 200, one can see a table 210, which contains two columns C1 and C2, base text column C1 for the selected base text and ruby text column C2 for the corresponding ruby text.
In a conventional ruby handling functionality there is provided an automatic ruby determination function for detecting individual words in the base text and for identifying corresponding ruby text. Each individual word, which is recognized as having corresponding ruby text, is displayed in a different row R1–R4 in table 210.
In table 210 one can see that the nouns “nihongo” and “rei” have been recognized by the automatic ruby determination function, and consequently each of those nouns is displayed in a different row of table 210, the noun “nihongo” in the second row R2 and the noun “rei” in the fourth row R4, both of base text column C1.
The characters, which are displayed in the first and the third rows R1 and R3 of base text column C1, do not have corresponding ruby text, therefore the corresponding ruby text cells are left empty. In a preview window 220, the user is provided with a display, sometimes called preview, of base text 100 together with the corresponding ruby text 102. If the user does not agree with the proposed ruby text 102, the user can edit the ruby text in ruby text column C2 of table 210 and consequently the preview in preview window 220 also changes.
If the display in preview window 220 is found to be correct by the user, the user may press the ok button 230. Subsequently, in the text document from which the base text has been selected, there is displayed the base text together with its corresponding ruby text as it had been shown in the preview window 220. Although satisfactory for certain applications, the ruby handling functionality described above is relatively inflexible.